Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India

BRAND NEW NATION

Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India

RAVINDER KAUR

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaur, Ravinder (Professor of South Asian studies), author.

Title: Brand new nation : capitalist dreams and nationalist designs in twenty-first century India / Ravinder Kaur.

Other titles: South Asia in motion.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Series: South Asia in motion | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020009907 | ISBN 9781503612242 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503612594 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503612600 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Investments, Foreign—India. | Branding (Marketing)—Political aspects—India. | National characteristics, East Indian. | Nationalism—Economic aspects—India. | Capitalism—India. | India—Economic conditions—1991– | India—Economic policy—1991–2016. | India—Economic policy—2016–

Classification: LCC HG5732 .k384 2020 | DDC 330.954—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009907

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Typeset by Motto Publishing Services in 11/15 Adobe Caslon Pro

SOUTH ASIA IN MOTION

EDITOR

Thomas Blom Hansen

EDITORIAL BOARD

Sanjib Baruah

Anne Blackburn

Satish Deshpande

Faisal Devji

Christophe Jaffrelot

Naveeda Khan

Stacey Leigh Pigg

Mrinalini Sinha

Ravi Vasudevan

For Anton and Noor

CONTENTS

1. Futures Market

PART I. Dreamworlds

2. Economy of Hope

3. Remixing History

PART II. New Time

4. Icons of Good Times

5. The Magical Market

PART III. Anxiety

6. The Second Liberation

7. Uncommon Futures

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

CHAPTER 1

FUTURES MARKET

FOR ONE WEEK every year, the main street in Davos, the Promenade, turns into an unusual marketplace. As the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) commences in this upscale Swiss ski town each January, many of its posh hotels, cafes, and even museums turn into sites of an extraordinary kind of exchange. The colorful billboards displayed on the buildings have messages such as India: Land of Limitless Opportunities, Make in India, Malaysia: Doing Business, Building Friendships, Brazil: A Country of Opportunity, Innovation, Sustainability, Creativity, Mexico: Seize the Day, Egypt: Invest in the Future, and Proudly South Africa: Imagine New Ways. First-time visitors may find these advertisements puzzling. What kind of commodity is being showcased, and who might be the intended consumers? But for regular visitors, the spectacle of nations jostling for attention is a familiar sight during WEF week. These sites are the veritable front offices of nation brands: nations packaged and advertised as attractive investment destinations in global markets. During the past decade and a half, they have become popular landmarks on the global investment trail, well-known stopovers in the packed itinerary of investors forever in search of new profitable opportunities.

This exclusive world of nation brands is a strange, heady mix of optimism and anxiety, and it is seemingly forever on the move. On my first visit to Davos in 2012, I found myself seated next to two men dressed in smart business suits at Brand India’s lounge, India Adda—marketed as a quintessential Indian hangout representing India’s culture of commerce—at Café Schneider. I recalled seeing them the previous day on Brand South Africa’s premises in the Kirchner Museum, where an exhibition on the African growth story had been inaugurated. We exchanged our business cards, the first ritual of networking, and over cups of masala chai sponsored by the Tea Board of India, they expressed their love for India and all things Indian. They were both investment bankers at a major global investment-management firm specializing in emerging markets. As I glanced at their business cards, the one in the purple tie jovially explained his job as an explorer who discovers new investment hotspots in the world. So where are those new hotspots? I asked. He replied promptly, In the emerging markets: the bright rays of hope in Asia, Africa, and Latin America cutting through the dark clouds of recession in the Euro zone. Mexico is coming up, Brazil is an attractive bet, and even Egypt is promising for those looking for alternatives, his companion chimed in. India is a long-term investment, he said in a reassuring tone. But the emerging markets can be risky; they heat up and cool down, and therefore one had to be ready to seize new opportunities, the man in the purple tie added with a broad smile as they prepared to leave. In this futures market, it seemed, the investors were forever in search of new investment hotspots across the world, just as the nations hoped to be discovered and loved as attractive investment destinations. Due thanks and pleasantries done, they stepped out in the fresh snow that had covered the Promenade in the meantime. They were headed to the Mexico pavilion in Hotel Panorama, where a festive evening celebrating Mexico’s potential as an investment destination was about to begin.

FIGURE 1.1. India Adda publicity poster featuring technofriendly young Indians invites global conversations on India. Kirchner Museum, Promenade, Davos, 2012. Taken by author.

FIGURE 1.2. A street view of the India Adda/Make in India Lounge. Winter Garden, Café Schneider, Davos, 2015. Taken by author.

FIGURE 1.3. Hotel Belvedere featuring Brand Egypt. 2015. Taken by author.

This flash-in-the-pan encounter, polite and even charming, peppered with speculations and forecasts of risks and opportunities, is typical of how conversations unfolded in these settings. The affective language of hope and optimism—the compulsory good news the business world thrives on—that the two bankers had used to describe the futures market of nation brands was familiar to me. I had been drawn into this world at a particularly dramatic moment when India’s emergence and rise as a world player, propelled by its high economic growth performance and future potential, was being celebrated across the world. India was said to have arrived on the global stage, the primus motor of the Asian century that together with China was expected to eclipse Western hegemony in world affairs. It was as if the pace of history had accelerated in anticipation of a new time when India could finally be rescued from the waiting room of history and reoriented toward a limitless future.¹ The early twenty-first century, we were told, was that of ascendance of the South, especially BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—the so-called big five. These countries were the leading stars of the many capitalist growth stories unfolding in the postcolonial and postcommunist nations. Envisioned afresh as an investment opportunity, the old third world was no longer a dark container of deprivation and overpopulation but a rich reservoir of resources and raw talent bolstered by its youthful demographic dividend waiting to be tapped by innovative entrepreneurs. The established hierarchies of north/south, rich/poor, core/periphery, developed/developing, and empire/colony seemed superfluous in the large-scale transformations redrawing the twentieth-century world map. The familiar world appeared to be upside down. In this unsettling capitalist geography, India’s emergence as a prominent nerve center of unbridled capitalism was a critical event in more ways than one.

FIGURE 1.4. Malaysia: More Opportunities at Hotel Panorama. 2015. Taken by author.

FIGURE 1.5. Brand Brazil bus in Davos. 2012. Taken by author.

FIGURE 1.6. Make in India campaign in Davos. 2015. Taken by author.

Recall here India’s established moral-political legacy as the prime mover of the third-world movement: the anticolonial coalition comprising newly liberated nations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.² Built on the shared experience of colonialism, the third world was more than a utopian dream of political liberation. Its cornerstone was economic independence seeking a fair redistribution of the world’s resources,³ the very opposite of the nineteenth-century free-trade imperialism that had created rich economic centers in the north and poor peripheries in the south. This move to fashion an independent third way beyond capitalism and communism in the mid-twentieth-century bipolar world underpinned India’s postcolonial nation-building efforts too. The sphere of economy itself was shaped as a mixed economy—an experimental hybrid of free-market enterprise and a planned economy—to realize the modernist dream of development.⁴ The Indian state was the key actor that planned large-scale development schemes and experimented in industrialization and import substitution in what came to be known as the tightly controlled License Raj, or a closed national economy. Against this background, India’s embrace of liberal economic reforms in the early 1990s was not merely an instance of liberal triumphalism sweeping the globe. It also signified an end of the third-world vision that India had helped shape in the heady years of independence. Given its sheer size and complexity, India’s shift toward capitalism was a momentous event in the organization of the world economy and the nature of global politics about to unfold. The official lounge of Brand India where I was seated was precisely a microcosm of these manifold shifts, a theater in which New India—the popular name for the postreform, technofriendly, high-consumption entrepreneurial nation—encountered the elite that governed the world. I was surrounded by cheerful images of the India growth story that foretold success and the unlimited potential of the nation to investors and policy makers. The publicity posters, glossy brochures, videos, and blogs were all geared to project India’s image in the language of desire: aspirations, promise, potential, talent, and limitless opportunities and growth. Dressed up as a branded commodity in Davos, the sign of India was called on to perform hope and promise for global capital, its nationalist dreams fully harnessed to the ever-enchanting project of capitalism.

The spectacle of the impending capitalist transformation of the nation-form has been in the public domain for a long time. An apt example of this hiding-in-plain-sight phenomenon is an Incredible India advertisement issued about a decade into the opening up of the Indian economy (fig. 1.7). The image features simple bold text reading Open for Business! against a rich crimson background. A common sign hung on shop fronts, Open for Business signals a commercial space accessible to potential consumers.⁵ Brought into the image frame of India, it is assigned a heavier task: to publicize the nation as a commercial enclosure, a space of limitless exchange and capital investment, now accessible in the global markets. That India is open for business is not just a witty turn of phrase; it is also an unambiguous description of the large-scale capitalist transformations—dubbed as the 1990s new economic policy—that deregulated the state control of the economy. Perhaps more significantly, the image is a disclosure of the making of the twenty-first-century nation-as-investment-destination phenomenon occurring in many parts of the world. The investment-destination model entails a full capitalization (transformation) of the nation into an income-generating asset: a new imaginary of the national territory as an infrastructure-ready enclosure for capital investment, its cultural identity distilled into a competitive global brand and its inhabitants—designated as demographic dividend—income-generating human capital that can be plowed back to generate more economic growth. In this logic, the injection of capital from outside is the vital force that fertilizes the earth of the investment-ready nation.⁶

This internalization of the market logic reconfiguring the nation-state into an enclosed commercial-cultural zone is what I call the brand new nation: the nation revitalized and renewed as a profitable business enterprise with claims to ownership over cultural property within its territory. Erected upon a double scaffolding of austere structural adjustment programs and lavish dreamworlds of long-awaited good times, the brand new nation form increasingly mimics an income-generating asset that can be branded, valued, and ranked according to its capacity to yield profits. In turn, its profitability is seen as the fast track to utopic futures. This phenomenon is especially visible in the old third world, now dubbed emerging markets. Once deemed out of sync with world time—the temporal rhythm of transoceanic trade and capitalist modernity—these new frontiers of capitalism are now said to be the unstoppable forerunners in the march to the future.⁷ What fuels this relentless capitalization of the nation-form, the urgent calls for ever-more economic reforms, is not just the nationalist dream of getting ahead of the first world but also the fear of being stopped, of being permanently left behind by global capital. The postcolonial anxiety of never making it always lurks beneath the spectacle of hope and optimism.

FIGURE 1.7. Open for Business poster. ITB Berlin, 2007. Courtesy of V. Sunil.

The counterintuitive logic at work, then, in the rational, profit-oriented world of investors is this: what is beyond economy is that which truly animates the economy. The affective investments—hope and optimism, love and devotion, and even anxiety and nationalist fervor—that at first appear superfluous or as distractions to the business of economic investments are in fact crucial to its workings. The noneconomic elements are always at work in what seems to be purely the domain of economy—the affective force that energizes the project of capitalist transformation and helps unlock the potential of economic investments. Witness here too a particular inflection of millennial capitalism⁸ taking shape especially in the Global South. The infusion of capital here is not only a magical moment that promises progress and prosperity but also the promise of effacing the shame of colonial subjugation and violence. Capital appears as a curative force that can even redeem the nation’s lost glory via economic growth. It is not just the infusion of capital that is critical in the making of the brand new nation; equally critical is the recognition of the nation’s growth story by global capital. Thus, twentieth-century nation building is increasingly being replaced by twenty-first-century nation branding. What is dubbed a growth story in policy-business circles is essentially an enchanting fairy tale of capitalist dreamworlds, a fairy-tale blueprint of economic reforms along with calls for a strong political leader to implement it. This transaction clearly exceeds the sphere of economy and liberal politics and cannot be explained in purely materialist terms. Instead, it reveals how twenty-first-century capitalism and cultures of hypernationalism are fully locked in embrace. It is hardly a coincidence that the era of liberal economic reforms has given way to populist strong leaders of the muscular variety. After all, capital has always rooted for strong, decisive leaders and centralized governance that can ensure its swift mobility and put the nation’s resources at the disposal of investors (see chapter 5, The Magical Market).

In many ways, this is an unprecedented shift in the history of the nation-state. The state has indeed always been an active economic agent, but what is different is the unabashed spectacle of alliance between economy, politics, and publicity through which the brand new nation takes shape. To make sense of this emerging phenomenon, we need to take the enhanced visibility of economy in politics not as a sideshow but as a signal of how the logic of the capitalist growth story has seeped into popular politics as the harbinger of good times. Across the third world turned emerging markets, the promise of the growth story is affectively entangled with the collective dreamworlds visualized and illuminated in the great spectacle of mass-publicity campaigns, the tantalizing blueprints of mass utopias by which the material condition of free markets comes alive.⁹ This book is about how the brand new nation came to be and about the kind of future that awaits the nation-state in the twenty-first century.

BRAND NEW NATION

The spectacular appearance of the brand new nation might seem off-script or even plain ironic to those familiar with the story of globalization—like a late-twentieth-century shorthand for the unhindered movement of capital, labor, goods, and people—and the opening up of the world. Weren’t we once told that the nation-state had been made obsolete, a superfluous political artifact in the age of globalization? And that the nation-state was standing on its last legs, faced as it was with crisis and potential demise?¹⁰ Recall how the euphoric triumph in the 1990s of liberalism at the end of history had ushered in the seemingly unstoppable force of globalization and in the process brought world areas previously closed to global capital into the fold of free markets.¹¹ The global nature of this capitalist transformation was produced in the language of accelerated mobility—of flows, movement, interconnections, fluidity, networks, transnationalism, deterritorialization, and cosmopolitanism—and the infrastructures of cheaper air travel, ever-new media technologies, new modes of consumption, and digital connectivity. In this moment of interconnectedness, the bounded enclosure of the nation-state increasingly stood out as an anomaly. The world in motion was moving toward denationalization in search of a postnational world order,¹² and whatever was left of the nation-state was the mere skin or the cracked casing of its former self, a vestige of an earlier age that was surplus to the age of unbridled capitalism.¹³

But there’s a twist and then a turn in this story. Defying all predictions, the nation-form was refusing to disappear, even going in the exact opposite direction of the one that proponents of globalization would have had us believe it would go. The moment the nation-state was being written out of the script of world politics was also the moment it was preparing to make a spectacular, highly choreographed comeback. Simply put, the very thing that was supposed to have been effaced in the borderless, flat world of free markets was morphing into a lucrative resource in the capitalist transformation of the old third world. The nation-form was ready to make a fresh debut in the circuits of global economy, having been decked out in the new garb of an attractive investment destination and its cracked skin or casing having been tailored into a distinct corporate brand. It wasn’t just India, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, or South Africa creating unique brand identities—the nation brands were everywhere. From Cool Japan; Creative Korea; Amazing Thailand; Wonderful Indonesia; Malaysia: Truly Asia; Russia: The Whole World Within; Azerbaijan: Land of Magical Colors; Australia Unlimited; 100% Pure: New Zealand; Brand Kenya: Make it Here; Remarkable Rwanda; Ghana: Uniquely Welcoming; and Turkey: Discover the Potential, to Miraculous China and Commercial Yiwu, the list is endless—and growing.

The second turn in the life of the nation-state is still unfolding. It is this: the age of globalization is said to be on retreat. The structures of globalization built on neoliberal economic interdependence appear to have reached their expiration date. Once celebrated as the harbinger of the world of flows sans barrier, globalization is now the object of political backlash in Europe and America. The ongoing nationalist challenge to borderless territories and free-trade blocks that enable the easy flow of capital and labor is a case in point. The double pressure of widening social inequality and northward immigration has created ground for populist measures to reclaim the nation-state and to erect a variety of barriers.

But what if we posit that the folding up of globalization does not mean a collapse of capitalism as such? That the popular move toward neonationalism, or nation-first politics, does not weaken but instead strengthens the nation-state as a dominant player in global capital? And what if we suggest that the twenty-first-century nation-state is not a mere rerun of the original that unfolded in previous centuries but has undergone an altogether new makeover in the age of capital? Put differently, we need to revert to an old (and overmined) question: What is a nation? Or more concretely, what kind of nation-form is emerging from the embers of late-twentieth-century globalization, which saw the implosion of millennial capitalism amid volatile boom and busts, the return of identity politics, and the attendant dramatic flux rearranging the liberal world order?

I propose that the brand new nation—recrafted and repackaged as a branded enclosure for capital in the twenty-first century—has emerged from within the structures of unbridled free markets and centralized state governance and of the spectacular imagination of utopian dreamworlds in capitalist design. This form emerged from an ongoing historical shift—the capitalist transformation of the nation-state wherein the logic of capital is the glue holding the nation and state together. The nation in this scheme is imagined as a vast enclosure of production, its territory a reserve of untapped natural resources, its population potential producers/consumers of goods and services, and its cultural essence a unique nation brand that distinguishes it from other investment destinations. All of these can be capitalized (transformed) into income-generating assets. The state is the authority that manages the income-generating capacity of the national enclosure and holds the power to visualize, brand, legislate, and spatially rearrange the national enclosure as a market-ready investment destination.¹⁴ The process of capitalization—the packaging of the nation and its identity by the state as an exclusive commercial brand—is what binds the nation to the state. This process unfolds along a visual reterritorialization of the national enclosure as a distinct economic zone and as a unified cultural-political identity.

The transformative work of the branding project lies not just in selling the nation to potential investors but also in the consecration of a particular form of state sovereignty—the visual power to celebrate the revitalized homeland and to see and show the national territory and its population as valuable factors of production available to global capital. The critical point in the making of the visual territory of nation brands is this: to be featured in the visual frame of the nation brand and to be shown (or shown off) to the world is to be affirmed as an organic part of the nation. The questions of economy, politics, and publicity remain deeply entangled in this visual reterritorialization. Who are the chosen people who inhabit the visual surface of the nation brand? Which cultural practices and ideas are left out of the frame, concealed from the eyes of the world? Who owns the nation and its natural and cultural possessions, and who has the power to capitalize these possessions? The visual frame of the nation brand is a form of public recognition of the nation’s cultural essence, the unique difference that acquires legitimacy precisely by being chosen for illumination by the state. Put differently, the state asserts its power by claiming proprietary control over the material and cultural possessions of the nation and, more importantly, the power to market them. The brand new nation reveals the close kinship between identity economy and identity politics and between publicity and populism at the heart of the ongoing rearrangement of the liberal political order.

I do not mean to suggest that capitalization of the nation is a smooth, uncontested operation. In fact, it opens space for political contestations, albeit of a specific kind.¹⁵ Witness here a field of politics that emerges through the brand—a volatile enactment of (neo)liberal statecraft and illiberal nationalism that feeds off of and further authenticates populist notions of an organic nation and the blood-and-soil purity of its inhabitants. The brand boosts the populist entanglements between corporeal and affective matters as a solution to economic problems faced by the people even as it generates extraeconomic reification of hypernationalist pride. What aggravates political volatility is the populist competitiveness between the state and its opponents—inasmuch as the state seeks legitimacy as an efficient brand manager of the nation and its opponents accuse it of not having performed that function well enough, of having failed the people. The economic success of the brand is what potentially enables extraeconomic agendas to be implemented. That the brand itself is inherently unstable, forever shaped by the excess of meaning it produces and even by counterfeit versions, means that such politics is almost always vulnerable to contingency.¹⁶ Nevertheless, the logic of the brand has by now filtered through the structures of power and governance—the nation is not just branded but actually turned into a territorial container of branded regions, provinces, and cities that compete to attract investments.¹⁷ Termed competitive federalism, this form of governance lives off a system of constant auditing and rankings that rewards and humiliates regions on the ease-of-doing-business criterion and the size of capital flows to boost economic growth. The capitalization of the nation brand is the magical formula that promises to unleash the authentic national spirit and, in the case of the old third world, even cleanse the shame of colonial subjugation that has long defined its place in the world. In short, to be discovered as an attractive investment destination in the world economy is to be affirmed as a proper nation in the early-twenty-first-century world order.

THE GREAT SPECTACLE

The making of the brand new nation cannot be explained only as the triumph of human greed and crass utilitarianism or even as the bland blueprint of structural adjustments that policy experts hand out. What gives it lifeblood is something else—its affective translation into popular politics via the great spectacle of the growth story—shorthand for the promise of economic reforms, dreamworlds of good times, and even a full sense of being-in-the-world—immediated through enchanting mass-publicity campaigns. To be sure, this translation of economic policy into popular politics is not seamless. The prevailing accounts of the great transformation of the postcolonial world—through structural adjustments and reform packages—move between two poles that hold the market formula either as an external imposition on reluctant nations or as a necessary utilitarian measure to lift people out of poverty and create development.¹⁸ What is often glossed over in such accounts is the human capacity and desire to draw futures, a desire that has always been a critical force in the project of transformation. I intend the verb draw to have a double meaning here—as the act of etching an image or a model and as the force that moves, that pulls something in the desired direction in order to rearrange the world. Once harnessed to the technologies of mass media via murals, photographs, films, posters, advertisements, billboards, events, and, now, social media trends, the art of drawing futures has been turned into the art of public persuasion. The vastly amplified circulation of symbols and messages is more than a public notice offering information. It is designed not just to inform but to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal, to grab the attention of the general populace (or consumers or spectators), and to mass market a given commodity or worldview.¹⁹ The work of mass-publicity campaigns is to invite or even provoke the public to partake in the project of drawing forth the futures.²⁰

This spectacular drawing of futures is what I call the great spectacle: the zone of contact between the speculative dreamworlds of the future and the material conditions of the present, the encounter between what is and what could be in the new time. In this theatre of persuasion, cold statistics and expert recommendations are transformed into populist politics dressed up as good times: visions of economic growth tied to hypernationalist dreams of a glorious ancient-modern future. This affective mediation is what gives nourishment to the enterprise of the nation brand, a kind of intimate yet impersonal immediate engagement that intensifies its mass appeal and circulation.²¹ The mass-publicity campaigns transform complex policy interventions into desirable blueprints of hope and possibility, producing a tantalizing vision that is the very opposite of the lacks, failures, and stagnations that have otherwise defined the old third world. Put differently, the spectacle of hope requires the lacking third world to be produced as a constitutive anteriority. Dressed up as attention-grabbing campaigns, the spectacle seeks to draw the attention of the different publics—from foreign investors, policy makers, and financial experts to citizens, local businesses, and consumers—to boost the global image of the nation as an investment destination, to draw foreign capital, to garner favorable trade agreements, and to sell economic reforms to its own citizens as pathways to progress and prosperity. The great spectacle, I suggest, is the drawing board of futures on which individual and collective dreamworlds can be speculated endlessly, the affective production of an avalanche of images that seek to overrun all other competing visions. In an image-saturated world, the work of the great spectacle is not just to produce images of the future but to modify and repurpose the flow of images in the desired direction.

The great spectacle produced through publicity campaigns has at best remained overlooked and at worst been dismissed as propaganda. Yet it is here that we find a rich visual archive that allows us to trace the complex social world within which the contemporary renewal of the nation is taking shape. The term propaganda comes with heavy baggage that tends to obscure more than reveal the complex processes at work. Any information labeled as propaganda, more so in the time of post-truth and fake news, is either viewed anxiously as a dark art of deception practiced via rumors and untruths to conceal reality or dismissed as meaningless noise that occupies the public sphere. In both cases, this tainted appellation means that propaganda material is often discarded in the junkyard of archival knowledge, and its potential remains unutilized. To be sure, the original use of propaganda was to indicate reproduction, but by the mid-sixteenth century the term came to be deployed in a religious sense to mean propagation of the doctrine of faith among nonbelievers.²² Perhaps it is this older etymological association with faith and indoctrination rather than with reason that gave propaganda its contemporary common usage: a recursive loop of dis/information designed to alter ideas and belief. But this recursive quality is what makes propaganda a rich archive of knowledge, albeit of a performative variety that aims to reproduce the self-contained worlds. Its value lies in activating an abundant repository of collective dreams, the mimetic archive, that sought to sneak into the lived worlds and transform those into their own image.²³ I gather this abandoned archive, the scattered bits and pieces of images, from the junkyard of propaganda and recycle it as an invaluable resource to write the history of the brand new nation.

This neglected archive discloses how the growth story has been laminated onto the old postcolonial nationalist dream of freedom, but this time freedom has been harnessed to the economic prowess of the nation-state. The possibility of a second liberation via economic growth not only taps into the collective insecurities and humiliation of the colonial past but also holds out the chance to finally overcome them on the global stage. The capitalization of the nation as a branded investment destination is an opportunity to at once add value to the nation by generating capital and, in doing so, gain prestige and influence in the world. The global celebration of the nation brand is even taken as an expression of national pride, fueling hypernationalist movements in many parts of the postcolonial world. The colorful display of the nation as an investment destination, a very twenty-first-century mode of arriving or making it in the world, grows out of these complexities—the desire to unhinge the nation from its colonial past and the impatience to inhabit the long-promised future. The enhanced visibility of the nation serves a dual function—it makes visible the potential and availability of the national enclosure in the global markets and simultaneously manufactures images of mass utopia that imagine personal aspirations and restoration of the authentic self in alliance with the national growth story.

This latest turn in the history of the nation requires that we engage with the modern enchantment with nation and nationalism, a form of intimate affiliation that at first appears at odds with commodification and market transactions.²⁴ In fact, thinking of the nation-form as a commodity seems to be an aberration, even a sacrilege. After all, weren’t we once told that "nations are not just political units but organic beings, living personalities²⁵ or that nations are not founded on mere consent or law but on the passions implanted by nature and history?²⁶ Yet I suggest that this very imagination of the nation as a unique eternal person is what opens ontological possibilities for the emergence of the brand new nation. Recall how nineteenth-century cultural nationalism evolved around the presumption that the essence of a nation is its distinctive civilization, which is the product of its unique history, culture and geographical profile.²⁷ For Johann Gottfried Herder, the father of cultural nationalism, nations were natural solidarities, living organisms endowed with individuality that could not be replicated across the global terrain.²⁸ And nearly a century after Herder, Ernst Renan, in his famous essay What Is a Nation?, proposed that a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle."²⁹ While Renan emphasized the question of consent and the dynamic nature of nation making—the everyday plebiscite—he saw the nation as a distinct moral-spiritual project that entailed a common history of love and suffering as an essential condition for being a nation.

This love, or national romance, embraced the geist (spirit) of the volk (people) and is a well-woven theme through more than two centuries, when national identity was carved in literary and artistic forms of natural landscapes and its ethnic inhabitants.³⁰ Sumathi Ramaswamy has shown how the nation has long been a sacred object of worship, its territory personified and pictured as sacred, the mother goddess placed at the sacrificial altar of patriotic devotion.³¹ This passion of nationalism has always demanded a special kind of love that exceeds all others and whose ultimate expression is martyrdom for its cause.³² For Benedict Anderson, it was precisely the question of death in the service of the imagined political community called nation that made him ask, What makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? This question tugs at tensions that are at the heart of the idea of the modern nation—the secular transformation of the sacred, the ideas of suffering and salvation poured into the form of nation that always loom(s) out of an immemorial past, and still more important, glide(s) into a limitless future.³³ The cultural roots of the imaginings of the nation and its variants, nationality and nationalism, grew from these tensions. What was fashioned was the modern nation: a political artifact of a particular kind, a virtual person who has long claimed origins in a timeless past and a wholly inalienable essence and whose nurturing required routine performance of love and complete devotion.

In the ongoing shift to capitalism, it is precisely these premodern expressions of love and devotion for the nation that strengthen the project of economic growth, albeit in a new form. The old cultural nationalist imagination of the nation as a living organism, a singularity, is what renders it transcendental